Tuesday, August 1, 2017

You were probably thinking I was going to announce that I brought home a new puppy. I REALLY wish that was the update I had to share. I mean, I'm not crazy enough yet to ACTUALLY want a puppy right now, but I would seriously much rather be dealing with the trials of bringing up another puppy and figuring out how to juggle three dogs versus the current situation. But I digress.

Mid April I was out for a run on my normal route, at my normal time, doing normal things. While I was crossing one of the intersections I normally cross, I was hit by a car. The driver was found to be completely responsible, because he completely was. The light was red. Two other cars coming the opposite direction had stopped for the light. He did not and hit me at 40 mph, sending me 30 feet. I suffered a concussion, head lacerations, some minor facial lacerations that needed suturing, a fractured nose, fractured T6 vertebrae, broken left femur (from the x-rays, definitely the most impressive break out of everything), broken left heel and broken right tib-fib plateau. I spent three weeks in the trauma unit with a few different hiccups along the way and four surgeries. I now have a titanium rod in my left femur and other hardware in my heel and tibia. I spent two months in a wheel chair after being released from the hospital and am more recently weight bearing on both legs with the aid of crutches. I hesitated on including this whole ordeal in the blog, but if I want to continue with the blog, there's really no way around it. This accident has very dramatically impacted my life and will continue to do so for some time to come. If I want to continue with this blog, there is no avoiding this topic.

As you can probably imagine, there's a whole lot that has gone on throughout this whole process. However, the focus of this blog is the dogs. I feel like I could have a completely separate blog going into things just about the accident and everything that has happened since that day, but I'm going to stick to that pertaining to the dogs.

First and foremost, neither of my dogs was with me on my run that morning. I have taken my dogs running in the past, but due to a hamstring annoyance last year, it was easier on me to run without Miley. And I have never been more thankful that I left her at home. I remember very little of the accident itself. I have a memory of interacting with at least one of the emergency personnel after they had secured. I remember realizing that something was going on, but not exactly what. I thankfully don't remember being in any pain at that moment, but I was trying to get from them what had happened. It was kind of like waking up from a dream and realizing that something was very off and I had not really been sleeping. Someone did tell me that I had been hit by a car and my first, that I could remember, reaction to that was to make two requests. The first was that someone had to go to my house because my dogs hadn't been fed yet. I gave them my home address and stressed that it was very important that my dogs were taken care of. At this point, I remember thinking that I wanted them to give my roommate a heads up so that he could feed the dogs breakfast and I would worry about them once things were taken care of at the hospital. My thought was that this was just common procedure and they were required to take me to a hospital to get checked out as sort of a liability thing. Again, I don't remember feeling any pain, so there wasn't anything that was actually cluing me in to how bad things were. I thought I would get checked over, maybe they'd take some x-rays and then I'd arrange for someone to drive me home. No biggie. Insert HUGE eye roll.

The other request I made was that they contact my work to let them know that I wouldn't be in that day. Again, I thought this was just a minor incident, but I wanted people at work to not be wondering where I was. So I prattled off my work number and they did call the lab to give them a brief update as to what was going on. This seems like a minor request right now, but it does come to play a bigger role with regards to the care of my dogs. And the people I work with are seriously some of the most amazing people. Which was only further emphasized throughout this whole "experience."

So the police stopped at my house and roughly filled my roommate in, though they wouldn't given him too many details since he wasn't family. He then found my parents' home phone number and called them to let them know what was going on. And yes, he fed the dogs their breakfast. :)

The crew at work were contacted by my mom after she and my dad got to the hospital. Which started the immediate task of figuring out how to take care of my dogs while I was at the hospital for a duration of time that no one knew. I seriously cannot stress enough how AMAZING the people I work with are!! Everyone in the group is an animal lover. Everyone knows how important my dogs are to me and they all stepped up to figure out how to cover their care for as long as I needed. One of the ladies in the lab was the point person on coordinating the dog care. She has two dogs of her own and a full house and wouldn't have been able to take in either dog. So she coordinated which dog went with who and the picking up of their food from the house or the store. No simple task since I feed raw and was actually going to be picking up a three month supply of food for Miley that week. My roommate was able to watch Miley during the week, but was out of town on the weekends, so different people from where I work stepped up and took Miley in on the weekends. Dominic went and stayed with the couple that he has stayed with every time I'm out of town and they were willing to watch him long term. With that aspect of things out of the way I could focus on dealing with what I needed to while I was in the hospital and focus on getting well enough to leave.

There were occasional offers of maybe bringing one of the dogs in to visit me, but I thought it would be more confusing for either of the dogs to see me in this very strange place and not in great shape. This stay away from the dogs was unlike any other separation I've had from them. Obviously it was very unexpected. When I'm going out of town, there's a pattern to the way that I prep myself and them for me leaving. This case had none of that preparation for what was to come. I thought it would be best to wait to see them until I was home and we could start the process of establishing our new normal. Plus I wasn't exactly sure how either of my dogs were going to get into my room unnoticed. ;)

So that was the hospital stay. Three weeks of thankfully awesome people making sure that my dogs were well taken care of and that I didn't have to worry about them. The next phase of this process was coming home and being in a wheelchair for two months. But I'll leave that for the next post. :)

About Me

My life with big dogs is focused on Miley, my fawn girl born in March of 2014, and Dominic, my black boy born in November of 2015. Our down time is spent running and hiking around beautiful Oregon. I'm also a fan of training my dogs to do random tricks and behaviors as well as working with them on a variety of overall strengthening exercises that involve a wide variety of stability balls and other pieces of equipment. Many of these activities I have videoed and you can see throughout the blog. I have previously competed in agility, rally, obedience, and skijoring with Heffner and Bess. Miley is just getting started in her conformation career and has started training for various performance sports. We're looking forward to a fun and active future! I hope you enjoy the blog and all of our adventures!